I doesn’t matter how you couch it, it’s fallacious, full of Walrus and Carpenter.
And what does this nonsense have to do with the gospel of universal reconciliation again?
It came from my wife’s Open University humanities material as I now recall. Fascinating. Not Kimosabe. Hugely important vein of Americana though that be. My American studies encompass a tad more than that. Fell in love with Lincoln three years ago while reading Team of Rivals.
That is quite a concept for a university. At any rate, good to know your source. But don’t stop with just one book – or one humanities class. Every writer (even textbook writers) has a personal perspective that they want you and I to share. May be a good one, may not be…
I have been to a few places associated with Lincoln’s presence. I still – for no reason in particular – think of his law partner telling others that Lincoln often showed up at work with tears in his eyes. The law partner in Lincoln’s pre-presidential days did not like Lincoln’s wife and attributed his partner’s moods to a bad morning with the missus. If all you heard or read of Lincoln, you would simply think of him as a henpecked husband shackled to a bad marriage. But that is not all to be said of the man…nor is one textbook’s description all that there is to be known about American religion.
Did I not read of people in the UK weeping after Billy Graham crusades in the early 1950s ? Seems that sentimentality exists in one form or another on both sides of the Atlantic…Or have I been watching too many reruns of “The Crown”?
Bless. In 66 years I didn’t.
In other words… if anyone says “If it’s not in the Bible, I wont believe it.” They are just out and out lying. The truth is more like this… If it’s not in the Bible and I don’t want to believe it then I will use the Bible as an excuse not to believe it. But then what about the things in the Bible which they don’t believe anyway? How many forked tongues do such people have?
What sardonically, despairingly amuses me is that the same people who are literal with regard to any Biblical metaphor refuse to see universal reconciliation in Christ. Can you believe it eh? Ah well, it has always been thus in the post-Jewish Church.
Ah yes, the golden age of revival. Sentimentality is a higher animal universal.
“A higher animal universal”…so much for the stiff upper lip! I would not suppose it to have been mere animal sentiment, though perhaps for some. That event may be long ago in British history, but hopefully for most participants it also meant a clearing-of-the-air and thus a change for (mostly) the better – and a new life in Christ. The point here being that the tent revivals of early (or earlier) American history were not all products of prairie ignorance. They did not have TV or big crusade stadiums or megachurches to re-create similar things as today. The source from your humanities course evidently had a certain perspective — or maybe most British sources look at the US and its history that way?. I also sometimes “get” that impression, at any rate.
The intellectual depth of the Pilgrim Fathers, Whitefield, the Puritans, Jonathan Edwards and many since in all denominations, but especially that thread, on in to the Southern Baptists and others was as deep as it could be for the time anywhere in Western Christendom. The message of Jesus especially through Paul had been lost long before.
well…now you are — with that last sentence — getting into a whole different topic than the earlier missive about us illiterate Yankees and our tent revivals. Whitefield, Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” etc were not a different breed than many of the revivalists. And Whitefield got around, so to speak, in his preaching schedule…
With your last sentence, though, you might say “If it’s in the Bible, I won’t believe it because the message of Jesus especially through Paul had been lost long before.”
You could start a whole new blog post here!! or maybe you already have…
Oh aye Robin. My father’s name. I’m not down on America at all - apart from as a late radicalized Christian, I know as much as most who’ve never been and then some. I devoured Steinbeck and Faulkner as a teenager, on top of the prodigious genre of American science fiction. American music, theatre - Miller especially, and of course movies. My sig used to be Fabricati Diem Baro! We get US news reports every day on the BBC. I was in and influenced by an American cult for 40 years.
[And as I’ve said repeatedly, I fell in love with Lincoln. I think he’s the greatest man of the C19th and a couple either side at least.]
That is true. There are a lot of things in the Bible that literalists do not believe. They just pick and choose which things they wish to interpret literally, and which things they do not, sometimes in adjacent verses.
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Don’t kid yourself.
Being Devil’s advocate here, they do not lie; they are perfectly, impenetrably sincere and nearly all of us here have been there or are still on the spectrum, especially with regard to the gospel. Fear is the key. Do you have an example Phil? I’ll play good cop for once.
How about Luke’s “blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God”? Most all of us prefer Matthew’s “blessed are the poor in spirit…” because that one is more malleable to game playing, and we all breath a collective sigh of relief that he couldn’t have been talking about our literal attachments to all our literal stuff.
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I was thinking more of Genesis one, believing in 6 days but not accepting the raqia or firmament as being a solid shell over the sky, or that the earth has four corners and is flat, or that there are windows in the sky that storehouses empty hail to the earth, though admittedly, some try to make a way to take these literally also.
Or that you can have a morning and evening without the sun, or you have 24 hour days without referencing the planets rotation to the sun, which hasn’t yet been created. Yes, some give tortured explanations, but they are far from literal acceptance of the text.
I like it Mervin, but whatever Matthew meant is still there. Humble in all senses. The rich aren’t. They can’t be. We can’t be. No matter how decent our dealings. We just can’t be. Not until we suffer loss. Furthermore, human nature being the self justifying exceptionalist hypocritical thing that it is, we can even twist blessed are the poor and the poor you will always have with you to mean we shouldn’t interfere in that state. And we do. We all do. Close enough. [Not ‘interfere’.] There are limits. A few nights back I encountered a man on a path at the very edge of town. We were ten yards apart, me walking, him stationary and there was something hesitant - not threatening - about him, I enquired as to his well being and got a diffident response. I approached, stepped back with a salute and said ‘Covid’, and he talked of being homeless due to relationship breakdown, that he was living in the hedge (yesterday I checked, he is) and insisted on saying he wasn’t a substance abuser and needed money for bed and breakfast. I never carry money partly for that reason. So that I don’t feel compromised when I say I have none to give. Apart from loose change. Such often ask for unsustainable B&B just for the night. I apologized for having nothing and said how sorry I was for his situation. He was totally downcast with an understandable edge of anger. I’ve worked with such people for 11 years having been such a person over 40 ago. I networked with a neighbour who’s another homeless charity volunteer, he knows the guy of course and like many we both know, he can’t be helped, which I more than suspected. There’s a huge, well resourced homeless centre in the city. The guy won’t use it. I took up the case of a young woman - with my wife - last year. I approached every agency. They all knew her. She cannot be helped. Not unless one opens ones door. To all. Do you know the cost of running someone’s life for them? So no. Don’t start what you can’t finish. Live with it. We must live with our helpless privilege. Some can be sustained at a slightly higher level. But we’re a long, long way from fulfilling the gospel.
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We have to put ourselves in their minds Phil. A day is a very concrete thing, no matter how abstract it can be, how metaphoric. Firmaments and logical inconsistencies are above their paygrade. Hang on to the days. I was all but YEC. Penultimate to that. I accepted literal six days of re-creation after the angelic wars that had made the old Earth, with its hazy, theistically evolved ID kinds, tohu and bohu. We were plan B. That was 50 years ago. Yesterday. The pre-Chicxulub world was to make them feel at home as they obviously aren’t mammalian… Why God made a Cenozoic world for it only to get trashed who knows… Once you put ‘faith’ ahead of reality, you end up in some very odd places.
Not to be argumentative, but I have trouble believing there are many creationists that would make so unsophisticated an argument. Rather, I imagine they would argue that if Scrioture contradicts evolution, then only Scripture would be true (hence the appeal I’ve seen to the words of Genesis regarding animals created, instantaneously, de novo, each “according to its kinds.”). But I don’t know if anyone, Ken Ham or John Morris or anyone else in that camp that would make the argument in the manner you describe. If I am mistaken I’d love to see examples of such. But all these very creationists of whom I am remotely familiar acknowledge the existence of all sorts of scientific theories, and historic organisms, and the like that are not in the Bible.
As it is, this line of reasoning would disprove plenty of things that we (And they) obviously embrace; nuclear physics or the Chinese Ming dynasty. I doubt this is really their real argument?
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